Maria Konnikova advocates deep reading and intentional use of attention. Although I’m a fan of books, I don’t think the medium matters as much as knowing what we want and being able to focus our attention on it.
Excerpts:
What do we lose when we stop reading deeply…We lose critical thinking ability. We lose our memory. We lose analytical skills. We lose metacognitive awareness. We lose creative thought. When we lose deep reading, we lose deep thinking.
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When things are easy, we often come away with the false impression of learning, knowledge, and comprehension. We think we know something when we actually don’t. The process of struggling with material, of grappling with new ideas, of trying things that are difficult, both mentally and physically, is how we learn to do the thing, how we grow, how we go from thinking we know to actually knowing.
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One of the most often quoted lines of poetry comes from Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.” She writes, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” It’s an exhortation to think (deeply!) about the choices you make on a day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute basis, because those choices, in the end, are what make up your life. And the time you’ve spent on them is time you’ll never get back.
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Your attentional choices determine who you are. And if you constantly choose to not pay attention, to go for quickness at ease, where exactly does that leave you?
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Let me end with lines from another favorite poet, Wendell Berry, from his poem “How to Be a Poet (to remind myself):
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill…
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
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Live your life fully. Learn to read books, once more—and to enjoy the journey.
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